Commuting into London with my girlfriend is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my day, as before I used work from home so would ‘lose’ about four hours of us time. We normally talk about plans for the day, news items, things of interest on twitter – the usual stuff.

Today was different.

As I missspelled yet another tweet I decicded that it was time to install a new keyboard; namely Swiftkey. Swiftkey is a popular replacment for the stock Android powered by an AI engine that helps predict your intentions with greater accuracy. Accuracy was something I dearly needed, as since moving to Android I felt like I had regressed to my early dyslexic days getting words and letters all wrong.

So off I went to the marketplace, thinking isn’t it great that I have the option to replace something as fundamental as the keyboard. Perhaps Android isn’t so bad after all.

Installation and setup was fairly simple, and soon enough I had a shiny new keyboard to use. Which promprly started to bog down my system and hold on key presses. Now some of you may have stuck with it, but this really rubbed me up the wrong way and after ten minutes of not much improvement I made my way to the uninstall menu.

Big mistake.

After uninstalling Swiftkey my keyboard defaulted to the chinese/english layout with no obvious way to change it back to the stock keyboard. At this point my girlfriend asked me a question about a tweet of mine, deep in thought of how to sort out this problem I responded with an irritable “What?”.

Afterwards I put the phone away and we continued our normal commute, but I did mull over the problem. As I was walking towards TechHub, it then hit me, that I wasn’t getting annoyed over a keyboard, it was the operating system.

The Android keyboard is a microcosm for the overall platform, the very nature of android and the fact that you can replace something as important as a keyboard is used as excuse for a substandard effort. The mindset feels like (and this is just my personal opinion) that the feeling is that its ok, not bad, satisfactory. Not good enough? Don’t worry install something else!

I fail to see how making the user apply plasters, bandages and gauze to a platform to correct its faults, is not only acceptable but lauded as a unique selling point.